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Aug-Sept 2017 Short Fiction Recs

On gray autumn days, there’s
nothing I want so much as a cup of hot tea, a blanket, and a good story. Here
are some good things I read over August and September—stories to drink in with
your tea (or beverage of choice) as the season darkens and chills.

Each month, Yagra plants a new
goddess to swallow the moon and save the world. This is such a hauntingly
beautiful and painful story of motherhood, loss, sacrifice, and innocence. It
marries mythic imagery and imagination with intimate feeling. Absolutely
gorgeous.

Sarai was kidnapped to be a
maker of perfumes for a Queen. She has the talent for it—to be a
scent-maker—but what she wants is to be a poison-tamer, for it’s only as a
poison-tamer that she may be able to escape her island prison. This is a
beautiful and heartbreaking story of love, loss, bitterness, and accepting
one’s true talent. And it’s fitting that a story about scents should be so rich
in sensory details. Marshall deftly creates an immersive, beautifully realized
world.

And oh, this is such a
delight! Weird, wild post-apocalyptic adventure with a girl who is little but
fierce indeed. When the sky turns silver, 65-year-old bunco-playing Navy widow
Emma A. Santiago wakes up as 8-year-old Emma Anne. There are pirates, flying
alligators, talking animal sidekicks, the Chihuahua Ladies, and more. This
story is almost impossible to summarize, and I won’t try. I’ll just say:
Cooney’s imagination is dazzling, and you want this wild fun.

Another feat of wild
imagination, but set in a far different world and told with a delicate air.
Doyle imagines Sei Shonagon, the Japanese Heian-era author of the classic The Pillow Book, as a “battle-poet.”
Shonagon is the champion for Empress Teishi in a court battle of seasonal
poetry—and her poetry literally fights shadows as well as the verse of
competing poets. Doyle’s piece delightfully evokes and pays homage to the real
Sei Shonagon’s writing and the world of delicate and elegant beauty which she
described. Lovely and charming.

“The Stickmen are beautiful and misshapen. Almost
human in proportion, but thin and with random extra joints or protruding nobs
of glassy flesh. . . As translucent as moonlight or handmade glass.”

This
is a dark, gorgeously written piece about coming of age during a glass
alien/monster apocalypse. The mysterious Stickmen have emerged from the ground
in the “Creator Lands,” and America seems to be in a state of perpetual war
against them. Yet south of the battle lines, a semblance of ordinary teenage
life goes on: the narrator goes to high school and gossips with her friend,
fights with her mother, and falls in love. But the trauma of war hangs over
everything, including the narrator’s veteran boyfriend. This is such a strange,
dark, layered and immersive piece which unwinds like a slow nightmare. . . but
a nightmare that also glitters with shards of beauty.

Like “The Age of Glass,” this
is a dark and unsettling piece which skillfully blends realist detail with the
surreal. Addie and Ben are a sister and brother who grew up in the “care” of an
abusive and neglectful father. Under these circumstances, the siblings formed
an extremely tight bond, but it’s a bond that Addie frets has been fraying
since Ben left their hometown for college. When their father dies, Addie sees a
chance to summon Ben back, “to get him out
of the city and away from his new friends with their professional haircuts and
working cars and matching dinner plates”—and to recapture their closeness.
She’s not above using magic to do so. What follows is a painful, intimate, and
tender story of family and trauma, of partial healing and of what can never be
healed. And yes, the siblings eat their father.

Like “The Dead Father
Cookbook,” this is a story of family and of a painful relationship between
parent and child. But the abuse in this story is less obvious—and it’s one that
the main character, a proud and socially prominent mother, does not recognize
at all. Mrs. Lim has died and receives gifts from her children in the Chinese
afterlife during the festival of Cheng Beng (also known as Qingming). But the
gifts from her youngest daughter, Hong Yin, always disappoint her. In fact,
Hong Yin herself has always disappointed her mother. This is a quiet,
understated tale of parental expectations and the damage they can inflict, of disappointment,
distance, and love. As in “The Dead Father Cookbook,” there is no easy
reconciliation in either life or death. This is the kind of quiet story that
still punched me in the gut.

Stories
of the future and hope

I want to end this story
round-up with two stories of hope. It’s too easy to see only despair and
dystopia in our near future. In recent issues, Clarkesworld presents something
different.

The story’s themes are in the
title. In a near-future world, climate change has devastated the environment
and led to large-scale water shortages in the Middle East. . . but in the wake
and midst of ecological destruction is hope. While dealing with water rationing
in a future Beirut, two teenagers, Amir and Mani, meet and fall in love. Both
teens are idealistic and intensely driven to improve the world with their
talents. They become scientists and urban planners. But though they work in
similar fields, their careers take them to different countries and keep them
apart. This is a story of love over a lifetime: Amir and Mani meet, connect,
and leave one another again and again. Their relationship is often a source of
pain. But it’s always there, even when they’re far apart; no matter what, Amir
and Mani are, in the words of one of Amir’s other lovers, “locked together.”

“I love you,” says Mani. “Even if we never quite
figure out what that should look like. You know that, right?”

This is a deeply beautiful and
hopeful story. It depicts a kind of social utopia, yet it’s also a story which
is nevertheless deeply aware of the unavoidability of human pain. Amir and Mani
are always surrounded by love; their friends and lovers are fellow scientists
and artists doing all they can to improve the world. During the course of the
story, Amir and Mani live and work in multiple countries, and everywhere they
go it appears that governments and people care about the earth and accept and
support science—which to me seems an incredible utopia all on its own. There
are no depictions of academic backstabbing or competitiveness; their work
colleagues and mentors are all supportive and caring. Moreover, polyamorous
relationships among multiple genders appear widely accepted, and jealousy/possessive
among lovers seems nonexistent. This is a kind of utopia founded amidst
environmental ruin. . . made up of people looking to heal that ruin. It’s a
story of hopeful technology and science, a story of work and love which
acknowledges the terrible conflicts that can occur between work and love. It’s
a story about how love can be complicated and painful even in the best of
worlds. And it is deeply hopeful, humane, and beautiful.

I’m cheating—I read this story
on October 1, so I should really be including this in my next recs list! Yet it
pairs so well with the story above that I felt I had to include it here. Like
Barber and Saab’s Clarkesworld story, this is a hopeful story of scientists
coming together to save the world. Unlike Barber and Saab’s story, the
scientists in Cade’s story are working to do this under governments which would
stop them—governments which are trying to suppress data on climate change. The
parallels to current politics are clear and terrifying. Yet I found this a
hopeful and uplifting story. The stone weta is an insect endemic to mountains
of New Zealand, and it survives terrible winters of cold and snow by entering a
state of hibernation in which “Eighty-two
percent of the water in its body turns to ice.” “Stone Weta” is also the code
name of a biologist who smuggles and hides climate data in the
mountains. This is a story of persistence and survival—of living things, often
small and unnoticed, who are able to survive under the harshest of conditions.
It’s a story of resistance. It’s a story of a network of scientists working
together to preserve knowledge. And it’s a story of transformation—of more than
one type—and of hope.

This is a deeply felt and
necessary essay. Chung writes of trying to have the type of conversations which
so many of us are now struggling to have. She writes from her own specific
perspective as a woman of Asian descent who was adopted by a white family that
now supports Trump. . . but I think her confusion and pain are shared by so
many of us now, of all ethnicities and family circumstances. The ending to this
made me tear up.

Bonus random rec

And while you're
here. . . if you'd like to hear the voice of an angel, check out this video of a young singer from Kazakhstan instantly stealing hearts around the world as he sings a
French rock opera song for a Chinese musical contest show.

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